Don't Sweat the Aubergine

the follow-up instruction that is the point of the procedure: you add a little milk to the egg, then stir in the nearby flour, then add some more milk, gradually working your way in a larger circle around the flour so that you stir in only the flour that the liquid will accommodate. Otherwise, you have to stir all the flour when there is only a little liquid in the bowl.
    Adding the flour to the liquid is the easier procedure. Even carefully working your way around the bowl as described above, you’re going to have to bash up the flour a bit, and that will develop gluten, which will make the batter rubbery. You might be worried that you’ll create a lumpy liquid if you try to merge a little flour with a lot of milk. Don’t be concerned about a few lumps: you won’t notice them once the batter’s cooked.
    It’s not worth getting out a piece of electrical equipment to make a batter. An electric whisk will give the flour a more aggressive going over than is good for it.
    3 • Resting . You don’t get much chance to relax when you cook a roast meal, but both the meat (after it’s cooked) and the batter (before) should. Resting a batter gives the process that will take place during cooking – the swelling of the starch molecules – a head start, and as a result you’ll produce a more cohesive batter. Stir the batter a little when you’re ready to use it, to disperse any lumps that have settled on the bottom: it may, because the starch has swelled, have thickened slightly.
    4 • Hot fat . To check if it is hot enough, drop in a teaspoon of batter. It should sizzle fiercely, because you want the pudding quickly to form a crusty base. Don’t use a thick oven dish: it won’t produce a crispy batter.
    If, at the end of all this, your beef has been out of the oven for 40 minutes, stay calm. It will be perfect.
STEWS
    We used to call them casseroles. They were 1970s dinner party staples; you could cook them from all-colour recipe paperbacks that Marks & Spencer sold for less than a fiver. But the term ‘casserole’ has come to seem, like prog rock and the bubble perm, rather naff.
    They’re stews now. ‘Stew’ has a pleasingly unpretentious sound; in the same spirit, we prefer to invite people for ‘supper’ rather than dinner. Not everyone, though, accepts stew as the generic description of meat (or fish) cooked in a bath of liquid. The meat in a stew, Shaun Hill (
How To Cook Better
) asserts, is not browned before simmering; if it were, it would be part of a braise. This is not a distinction that many others make, even though the most famous dish with stew in the title – Irish stew – does not include browned meat. Richard Olney was not aware of a no-browning rule when he wrote
Simple French Food
: ‘Nearly all stews,’ he advised, ‘belong to the branch commonly (some say incorrectly) known as sautés’ – the meat and vegetables are given an initial colouring in fat.
    The difference between a stew and a braise, according to several writers other than Shaun Hill, is that a stew contains more liquid. If you don’t brown the meat or vegetables, but cover them instead with water or marinade and cook them in a covered pot, you’re preparing a daube. If you follow that procedure, but then make a sauce with a roux and the cooking liquid, and thicken that sauce further with cream and egg yolks, you’re making a blanquette. Dishes such as coq au vin and boeuf Bourguignon, as well as carbonnades and navarins, are stews of the sauté type.
    Sorry. This theorizing won’t get the dinner – supper, I should say – ready. I’m going on about the terms because they describe three basic techniques, on which every stew recipe is an improvisation.
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HOW TO MAKE IT
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    Lamb or beef, for 6
    1.2kg cubed meat 1
    Oil for frying
    4 onions, chopped
    2 celery sticks, chopped
    2 garlic cloves, chopped
    Glass white wine
    Stock ( see here )
    Herbs (parsley, bay leaf, thyme)
    Salt
    150g mushrooms, sliced
    Large knob of butter
    Heat a heavy frying pan or ridged grill pan over a medium to high flame. In a bowl, toss the meat with just enough oil (about 1 tbsp, probably) to coat it – you can do the tossing with a spoon, but may find it easier with your hands. When the pan is really hot, put in a batch of meat without crowding the pan. The undersides of the pieces should brown in less than a minute. Turn them, to brown another side, and transfer to another bowl. Repeat the process, until all the meat is browned.